From the start, Gov. George Ryan and his top aides knew they would take a hit when the families of murder victims recounted their gruesome, heartbreaking stories at the 142 clemency hearings for Death Row inmates.
But neither the governor’s office nor the state’s leading critics of the death penalty fully expected just how potent that testimony would be.
The debate over reforming the capital punishment system was quickly overpowered by the emotion of it all, leading Ryan to retreat and say he was having “second thoughts” about granting a blanket commutation for the state’s condemned prisoners.
“We always knew that if there were going to be hearings … that there would be some emotional testimony,” said Dennis Culloton, a spokesman for Ryan. “It wasn’t something we relished anyone having to go through.”
Rob Warden, of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University and a coordinator of the clemency requests, was more blunt.
“I would have to admit that we probably underestimated it. It’s pretty much overpowering,” he said.
The nine days of hearings before the Prisoner Review Board end Monday. Although it may seem that the hearings exploded onto the public’s consciousness, they were in the making long before Ryan’s off-the-cuff remarks at an Oregon death-penalty conference last March that he would entertain blanket commutations before he leaves office in January.
Months before that, death penalty lawyers had been discussing among themselves filing petitions for every prisoner on Death Row, figuring Ryan’s concern about the issue might make him sympathetic to a bold stroke like mass commutations.
But Ryan’s remarks caused the process to snowball–defense attorneys geared up and filed petitions and prosecutors countered, requesting a formal hearing for each case.
The mass clemency filings were risky for all sides.
For defense lawyers and other death penalty critics, the gamble was that the challenge to their petition, especially from victims’ families, would not overtake their long-standing issues. They figured–wrongly– that media coverage would wane after a couple of days.
For Ryan, the risk was that by even considering commutations, he was inviting criticism that he was hijacking the role of the appeals courts.
Although Ryan seemingly had little to be concerned about with the governor-appointed review board, it proved another source of friction, virtually imploding as some board members openly criticized the governor and the hearings.
Prosecutors have been criticized by the governor’s office and others for putting victims’ relatives through the emotional torment of reliving the crimes and their aftermath, but they nonetheless had the emotional trump card.
The families were on their side.
That difficult investment–one that prosecutors say the victims’ families wanted to make–has paid political and public relations dividends. Board members have recoiled at the stories before them, and prosecutors have gained some powerful momentum.
The issues that had defined the death penalty debate for more than two years–bad defense lawyering, police misconduct, the use of unreliable witnesses–have faded, at least for now.
Perhaps more than anything the hearings have made clear what seasoned observers have always known: When playing to a jury, true-life emotional stories will always trump a dispassionate case analysis.
“This did not surprise the state’s attorneys of Illinois,” said Kevin Lyons, the state’s attorney in Peoria County. “It may have surprised the [anti-death penalty] groups, because they were so used to having their message be carried loud and long without objections” from victims’ families.
State’s Atty. Richard Devine, who mobilized some 150 prosecutors in his office to respond to about 90 Cook County cases, said it was too early to tell if the strategy had succeeded with the governor.
“If the result is that very few of these individuals are taken off Death Row, then [the families] will have suffered pain to some purpose,” he said. “If we see a number of cases where it’s clear that he’s looked for a category to fit them under to make a simplistic decision, then they will have gone through the pain unnecessarily.”
Death penalty critics, though down for now, are confident of an emotional comeback. They plan to bring to Chicago dozens of former Death Row inmates who had been cleared to tell their stories of being wrongly imprisoned. That event is scheduled for December.
“The good news is that this isn’t the moment the governor has to decide anything,” said Lawrence Marshall of Northwestern’s Center on Wrongful Convictions. “So there still is time to remind people how we got where we are and what to do about all these problems the governor’s commission identified.”
The governor said Tuesday that the stories of victims’ families had moved him and caused him to nearly rule out wholesale commutations. But by Thursday night, he sounded as if anything was possible.
Speaking in Washington at a dinner for a death-penalty legal center, Ryan acknowledged the families’ testimony. But he said he was disappointed that his reform legislation is “languishing” in the state General Assembly. More pointedly, he reminded the audience that his clemency powers are broad.
He even cited former Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice Moses Harrison II, who in several dissents in death penalty cases wrote that reforms to the system should be applied retroactively to the condemned inmates.
And Culloton, Ryan’s spokesman and close adviser on the issue, noted that many of the state’s wrongly convicted inmates–including Anthony Porter and the men imprisoned for the rape and murder of medical student Lori Roscetti–were targets of the same kind of criticism as the condemned inmates now seeking clemency.
The push for fixing the death penalty system began after Porter, who had come within 48 hours of being executed, was freed in early 1999. A year later, after a Tribune investigation of the death penalty system, the governor halted executions and appointed a commission to propose reforms. It issued its report in April.
After Ryan’s comments in Oregon set off a scramble, death penalty lawyers could have risked not filing the clemency petitions, hoping Ryan might use the broad powers of the state Constitution to unilaterally grant commutations.
But they said they did not want to risk a court challenge. In 1995, then-Gov. Jim Edgar commuted the death sentence of convicted murderer Guinevere Garcia, who wanted to die and refused to sign a clemency petition. After he left office, state law was changed, requiring every inmate requesting clemency to file a signed petition.
In Ryan’s office, the governor and his aides have always known they would have to deal with the stack of cases that represents virtually every Death Row inmate. All were tried without the benefit of reforms proposed by the commission that Ryan appointed.
“We’ve been looking at these cases for three years–we knew these would be hard cases,” Culloton said. But the emotion is “not the issue. The issue is whether the right person has been convicted and sentenced to die and whether it was fair.”
As the debate rages on, Ryan still holds the possibility of a blanket commutation over a legislature reluctant to make changes to the death penalty system.
The governor, according to Culloton, often repeats the words that former federal judge Thomas Sullivan spoke when announcing the findings of the Ryan commission.
“`Repair or repeal’–that’s something he still quotes all the time,” Culloton said.
